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EMC Momentum 2009 – Summary

So its nearly a week since the event in Athens closed and I’ve had enough time to gather my thoughts, and write up some of the sessions, so it is time to summarise the 3 days which I spent there.

To put the conference into perspective I think we need to understand the market and past 12 months of EMC CM&A.

ECM Market

SharePoint continues to be the young pretender breaking into the market. They have no doubt increased their market share in the past 12 months, no figures to back this up unfortunately, and the release of SharePoint 2010 will be a major milestone in the marketplace in the next 12 months as it increases its DM and EDRM functionality. IBM and FileNet continue to be a confused product and player in the market, the traditional strength of BPM in the product is diluted by the integration into IBM and the Process Server product. OpenText remain strong and their relationship with SAP will see them continue to play strong in this area, whilst some of their SharePoint and Microsoft products are attractive. Their big strength though is their solution focus and they are very good at going to market with solutions which focus on business value. Adobe are making a strong play in the market with their forms product and the tie up with Alfresco is certainly interesting. The Open Source market will continue to grow.

Where does this leave EMC CM&A?

I believe they are still strong, going into Athens I believed they were in a strong position, coming out I believe the steps they are taking will ensure they remain a leader.

Momentum Summary

The messages I came away from Momentum with were the three new groups within CM&A:

– Information Governance

– Information Access

– Process

Of the three I see Process as being the one which can lead EMC to success, with Governance not being far behind. Why?

Information Access – of the three groups I believe this one will be impacted most by SharePoint 2010. Organisations will become less likely to look to another product to manage their documents when SharePoint can be considered good enough. When it comes to collaboration SharePoint is strong, no doubt about that, yes it has flaws but it is a product which does a job well. At Momentum 2008 EMC’s message was all about Centerstage; this year I did not get much of a feel for that (although I did spend more time on xCP sessions). Plus Centerstage has been delayed a number of times, I just think it will be a hard sell to push this as a Collaboration play within an organisation who are remotely interested in SharePoint.

Information Governance – the acquisition of Kazeon could be key to the success of this group. EMC can now deliver a compelling message about managing records in-situ, finding information to assist in meeting compliance needs and also about moving information to the appropriate storage tier. eDiscovery has been banded around in the market a lot in the past 2 years but I see this becoming more and more prevalent as organisations begin to act on the risk threats they perceive.

Process – as I said above, this one caught my eye the most. I went into the conference unconvinced about xCP, and to be honest version 1.0 is still nothing more than a collection of products, no matter what the marketing hype. However the ambitions which EMC have for this could really start to drive some opportunities. As I said above OpenText are very good at selling business solutions, the xCP programme where partners and EMC develop business solutions together, will put EMC in a position to challenge OpenText on a level playing field, except the BPM capability of Documentum is greater than that of OpenText. Also by moving the xCP platform onto the Centerstage paradigm it will enable more composite solutions to be built as this is much more aligned with Portals. From personal experience the ability to show Documentum information/content alongside other important information is something customers do wish for and the solution until now has been to bespoke this using a Portal solution or something similar. Also by improving some of the underlying architecture to support things such as relational objects will make developing these applications so much easier and instead allow us as SI’s to focus on the business value of the solution rather than how we relate a vehicle to a claim.

Was it worth attending the event?

Yes, definitely. Again this was an excellent networking event and I have made a number of contacts which I will work with over the coming weeks and months. Its also nice to catch up with some old faces such as Andrew, it would be great if Pie could find his way to europe one year although it could be said that I need to get stateside at some time. There is a lot more which goes on at these events than the presentations and these sometime become as important as the session. I enjoyed the news on xCP and will just have to be patient for this to be realised, if EMC can execute the plans in this area successfully, and importantly, in a timely fashion then I can see the product set breaking out of the pure EDRM mould and starting to play in areas of business where they have sometimes struggled.